What a fantastically Orwellian title.
I know that one of the main goals that Toady has, however, is making sure that players aren't directly controlling dwarves, and he's actually working more towards making them act more independently than they behave now.
Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?
Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander. I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system. Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.
Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior? Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability? Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone? While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.
At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons. At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods. Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults. Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system. For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.
On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation. The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time. If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws. That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.
Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build. It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected. The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview. If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed. Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.
In general, the player tends to act as mayor or expedition leader more than anything. The military screen is at least hypothetically the militia commander, while the medical screen is hypothetically the CMD, as well, but these all have transitions of power so rapid that you might not even notice losing your militia commander in a pitched battle.
The baron or monarch presents more interesting options, though. They're dwarves that generally don't do anything, anyway, so attaching some responsibilities to them which aren't actual mind control, but can cause more direct capacity to command that dwarf to go places or do things because they are the player's more direct avatars in the game would be interesting.
Currently, when you use the manager, for example, your orders don't actually take place until your manager has gone to their desk and written down those orders, because the manager "is you" in that case. Having the baron or monarch actually need to perform some observable action as your orders are carried out would be an interesting change, and help explain why they aren't just "useless nobles", but simply performing more vital jobs than hauling at the moment.
The question would be what, exactly, they're doing, however. You can already perform most fort functions with nothing but an expedition leader who takes no time out to manage the other dwarves.
You're suggesting a few things, with who an order is given to, but isn't that something that already exists with profile managers? Or are we talking about some different type of order, and if so, which?
I'd also be a little loath to take away priority until you have barons. There needs to be something that becomes activated with the baron's arrival that isn't necessary in smaller forts.
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Topic: Thought Alterrations (Read 667 times)